On Friday 13 April 2007, John Summerfield wrote:
Peter Arremann wrote:
4200 is a performance rating... Originally they modeled after a Pentium III, later switched to comparing to Duron performance. With dual core everything got even harder to determine - but important thing is that 4200 is just a relative rating and doesn't mean 4.2Ghz.
Pentium IV, not III I thought. No point comparing with Duron, it's one of AMD's own processors. When Intel redid its implementation, AMD kept on extrapolating from the older Pentium IVs so as to continue using the same measuring stick (and getting bigger numbers might be nice too).
Glad that thread is already marked as off topic :-) AMD first used PR numbers for the K5 comparing it with the P54C Pentiums... They then re-based for the K6. And the K7. And then for the Athlon64s... The Athlon XP was unofficially compared to the P4 numbers... And somewhere in the middle they compared XP performance against their earlier Thunderbird Athlon models as well. And then AMD wondered why their quantispeed nonsense never really became popular with consumers :) All that is up on wikipedia and many other sites...
Anyway, this is what I remember cause a friend of mine was working at intel in europe at that time. AMD ran into issues in some European countries where competitive commercials are not allowed. That means you can't advertise your product as being 20% faster as something from another company. Although I can't remember AMD ever saying they compared to the Pentium 4 - they for a while had the statement saying that their performance index was a relative speed measure comparing to a Duron... I found a few emails in german pointing to that but nothing official...
Peter.